Works

Slideshow

Thumbnails

About

Francesca Woodman (Denver, 1958 – New York, 1981) was an American photographer best known for her black and white pictures featuring either herself or female models. Many of her photographs show women, naked or clothed, blurred (due to movement and long exposure times), merging with their surroundings, or whose faces are obscured.

Woodman worked with traditional photographic techniques but was consistently performative and experimental in her practice. Many of her works are multi-media, including drawings, selected objects, and sculptures within her photographs. Settings may vary from confined interiors to the expansive outdoors, but Woodman herself is always there. Typically the sole subject, and often naked, she can be found caught entwined within a landscape or edging out of the photographic frame. Interested in the limits of representation, the artist's body is habitually cropped, endlessly concealed, and never wholly captured. Woodman was acutely aware of the evanescent nature of life and of living close to death. She positions the self as too limitless to be contained, and thus reveals singular identity as an elusive and fragmentary notion.

Woodman’s work has exhibited widely, including comprehensive solo exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2012), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2011). Other exhibition venues include the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2008); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2006); and the Fondation Cartier pour L’art contemporain (1998). Her work is present in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Detroit Institute of Arts.